May 4th, 2008

I had discovered these granolas a while back while surfing the web, but gave up looking for them them after many fruitless searches. Then suddenly of all random places, I went to one of those non-descript soup / salad / sandwich lunch places that are scattered all over Manhattan and low and behold, what do I find but Erin Baker’s Granolas! Without thinking twice, I grabbed both the Peanut Butter and Double Chocolate Chunk flavors, and off I went.

To get a well rounded opinion, I ate these granolas three different ways:

Dry, out of the bag
In milk, by themselves
In milk, over other cereal

For the record, the level of chocolate is generally what I focus on, while the level of peanut butter is what my taste tester focuses on. I tend to think sweets don’t have enough chocolate, while he thinks they need like double the amount of peanut butter they have. Unfortunately he couldn’t taste these because he is allergic to flax (the granolas have flax seed meal) so it was all up to me!

The Chocolate Chunk Granola

I think I might have actually gasped out loud when I saw the giant chunks of chocolate in the chocolate granola. Even still, I think I was skeptical of the potency of chocolate granola after being disappointed with Bear Naked’s, which was not a fair predisposition to have when tasting this brand. However, after eating a spoonful that had two glorious chunks of chocolate in it (this is not a rare occurance while eating this granola) I started to become a believer. I can also say that even the bites without big chocolate chunks are more chocolatey than I remember the Bare Naked variety being.

Also, while I’m comparing the two, I mentioned in my review of the Bare Naked granolas that I didn’t think their flavors held up at all in milk. In contrast, these granolas not only tasted potent dry, but definitely held onto their flavor in a bowl of milk. In fact I think the addition of milk may have made them even better.

The Peanut Butter Granola

The Chocolate Chunk was great, but I think of the two, I actually prefer the Peanut Butter. It was, at least to me, very peanut buttery and it was nice to see and taste those large chunks of peanuts scattered throughout. It tasted like I had sprinkled crunchy peanut butter cookies over my cereal. And the peanuts added just a little salty flavor to the mix, which was really pleasant. When I put even amounts of the chocolate and peanut butter granolas in a bowl, the peanut butter flavor seemed to be more dominant.

In Conclusion

If you’re looking for a way to add some chocolate and peanut butter to your breakfast cereal, buy yourself some of Erin Baker’s Peanut Butter and Double Chocolate Chunk Granolas. It’s almost like you’re tricking your tastebuds into thinking you’re having dessert for breakfast when you’re actually eating something healthy.

My only complaint is that I wish they were shipped to more locations in my area. Like, directly to my house. :)